Posts Tagged ‘Michael Pfleger’

You often don’t hear the truth about a politician from his or her own lips. Politicians know how to cautiously craft their speech; they know how to distort, misrepresent, and flat-out lie. No, you often have to get the truth about a politician secondhand.

PREPARE for a new America: That’s the message that the Rev. Jesse Jackson conveyed to participants in the first World Policy Forum, held at this French lakeside resort last week.

He promised “fundamental changes” in US foreign policy – saying America must “heal wounds” it has caused to other nations, revive its alliances and apologize for the “arrogance of the Bush administration.”

The most important change would occur in the Middle East, where “decades of putting Israel’s interests first” would end.

Jackson believes that, although “Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades” remain strong, they’ll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House.

“Obama is about change,” Jackson told me in a wide-ranging conversation. “And the change that Obama promises is not limited to what we do in America itself. It is a change of the way America looks at the world and its place in it.”

Jackson warns that he isn’t an Obama confidant or adviser, “just a supporter.” But he adds that Obama has been “a neighbor or, better still, a member of the family.” Jackson’s son has been a close friend of Obama for years, and Jackson’s daughter went to school with Obama’s wife Michelle.

“We helped him start his career,” says Jackson. “And then we were always there to help him move ahead. He is the continuation of our struggle for justice not only for the black people but also for all those who have been wronged.”

In other words, the guy who has known Obama for years, known his family, and helped him get his start in politics says, “Be afraid, Jew: Obama is going to end your world in order to build a better one.”

France loves Obama. But Jews shouldn’t And Israelies certainly shouldn’t. You can’t trust him on his stand for Israel. He’ll say whatever he needs to say, and you won’t know what he really believes until he gets in power. To Jews he said, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” And then he turned right around and said to Arabs, “Well, obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations.” You don’t know Barack Obama. But Jesse Jackson sure knows him.

By the way, France willingly participated in helping the Nazis round up Jews to feed into their Holocaust death machine. And it still has a great deal of Antisemitism to this day.

Last week I wrote an article titled, “Barack Obama Proclaimed As Messiah – The Beast Is Coming.” I conclude in that article: “The United States isn’t mentioned in Bible prophecy. Now we begin to see why: we wont’ matter because our economy will be in ruins. And we certainly won’t be the kind of nation that will be willing to come to Israel’s aid against the beast when they need us most.” Frankly, I didn’t realize that Barack Obama already had undeclared plans to undermine the Jewish state in order to advance his idea of a “new America” that will “fundamentally change its foreign policy” to “heal wounds” by cutting “Zionists” out of the picture.

Christians like myself view Jews as “God’s canary in the mine.” How a nation treats the Jews demonstrates its moral condition. As a nation blesses the Jews, God will bless that nation. And as a nation curses the Jews, God will curse them (eg., Genesis 12:3). But as I have already also written, Barack Obama would be President of God damn America. So it doesn’t surprise me at all to learn from a key longtime Obama confidant that Barack Hussein Obama would pursue a policy that would damn America.

It was primarily American Jews – greatly assisted by American Christians who believed the Bible – who helped conceive and lay the groundwork for a Jewish state in the land that God gave to Abraham and his descendants as an eternal possession (Genesis 17:8). The United States was the first nation to officially recognize the state of Israel. And the United States has been a better friend of Israel and the Jew than any nation in the history of the world. And the United States has been blessed as no other nation in the history of the world, I believe, as a direct result.

Barack Obama, the false messiah who would undermine this nation’s foundations and leave it a hollow shell by means of his disastrous policies, would sever that relationship of blessing and turn it unto divine cursing, according to a happy Jesse Jackson.

Let us not forget that Jeremiah Wright engaged in antisemitic rhetoric at Barack Obama’s church; and that Barack Obama’s Trinity United Church named vitriolic Antisemite Louis Farrakhan it’s Man of the Year; and that Barack Obama actually helped lead Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March. And then Louis Farrakhan in turn declares that Barack Obama is the messiah.

Campbell Brown wrote a commentary titled, “So what if Obama were a Muslim or an Arab?” I wrote an article titled “Why Islamic Extremists Support Democrats And Obama” without mentioning either Obama’s race or religion. With all due respects to Campbell Brown, if Barack Obama is elected President, we are going to very soon discover that worldviews matter. And Frank Marshall Davis, Saul Alinsky, Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, William Ayers, Louis Farrakhan, ACORN, and yes, Jesse Jackson ought to tell us that Barack Hussein Obama has a very radical worldview, indeed. He has simply been smart enough to conceal both his worldview and his agenda.

Barack Obama will bring monumental change, no question about it. Given the fact that if he is elected, he will likely have such an overwhelming majority under Nancy Pelosi’s House of Representatives and Harry Reid’s Senate that Republicans won’t be able to do anything about anything, Obama would likely have more power than any President in our lifetimes. There will be change like we have never seen.

But you haven’t heard quite as much about James Meeks, the third of Obama’s three closest “spiritual advisor’s.” You can hear one of his “sermons” on Youtube.

We certainly could learn more about another of Barack Obama’s friends from Chicago, Penny Pritzker, who heads the Obama campaign’s National Finance Committee. We can look into her own financial background and learn that not only was she the president of Superior Bank – which massively failed; and not only did she literally personally buy her way out of jail by paying a $460 MILLION dollar “fine”; but that she was at the very epicenter of what would become known as “the subprime loan scandal” that would come to eat this nation’s financial system alive.

We could look at former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson, former head of Obama’s vice presidential selection committee until it was discovered that he had benefited from sweetheart loans from subprime king Countrywide.

The name Tony Rezko certainly ought to sound familiar.

The name William Ayers, terrorist bomber, Obama-co-lecturer, fellow board member, neighbor, and friend should certainly come to mind.

Barack Obama has been steeped in radical politics since the day he emerged from his atheist secular humanist grad student mother’s womb. The openly communist Frank Marshall Davis was his childhood mentor; Saul Alinsky and Gerald Kellman (it was through Kellman’s Woods Fund that Obama met leftist terrorist William Ayers) dominated his thinking in college. He chose the most radical church in the country; he chose to make Jeremiah Wright his “spiritual mentor”; he chose to immerse himself in hard-core ideological radicalism. Never before has this country considered such a radical leftist for its chief executive.

Barack Obama’s own wife Michelle should have a LOT more explaining to do than her “and for the first time in my adult life I’m proud of my country,” her, “America is a mean place in 2008″ comments. If that’s all you know about her “work,” you have no IDEA. The following short video is guaranteed to give you some “Oh, My God!” moments, or I’ll refund your money:

Now we find another Obama association that exposes a whole other ugly can of worms.

Chicago lawyer Mazen Asbahi, who was appointed as the national coordinator for Muslim American affairs by the Obama campaign (if this link fails you will know that the Obama campaign is continuing to scrub its website) less than two weeks ago, stepped down Monday after an Internet newsletter wrote about his brief stint on the fund’s board – which also included a fundamentalist imam – prompting The Wall Street Journal to email inquiries. Asbahi attempted to make his brief time on a board the issue, when the real issues were his relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, and his 8-year long personal relationship with Hamas fundraiser Jamal Said.

Gee, Mr. Barack Hussein Obama. If you really want people to forget that you are the son of a Muslim father who served an incredibly brutal and corrupt Kenyan government; if you want them to forget that you attended a madrassa in Indonesia as a child and even practiced Islam; if you want them to forget that you campaigned in Kenya on behalf of your cousin, Raila Odinga, who relied upon chaos, corruption, and even violence in his campaign; numerous other troubling associations between yourself and radical Muslims; forget those photographs of you waling around in traditional Muslim clothes, well then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t hang around with Muslim radicals such as Mazen Asbahi and another radical pal of yours, the anti-Semite Rashid Khalidi.

It is frankly impossible for me to understand how Barack Obama managed to win the Democratic nomination. That so many Americans could care less about who their candidate really is – beyond the fact that he is the Democrat in the race – is simply amazing.

“Don’t tell me that words don’t matter. ‘I have a dream.’ Just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words. Just speeches. It’s true that speeches don’t solve all problems, but what is also true is that if we can’t inspire the country to believe again, then it doesn’t matter how many plans and policies we have.”

You remember that speech? Hillary Clinton had been charging that Barack Obama, her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, was great at offering voters words, but not substance. And Barack Obama responded by reeling off all these great words that had had such a powerful impact upon America and following up with each by asking, “Just words?”

Well, within a short time, it was revealed that they were actually the words of Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. And there was that whole deal with Hillary Clinton saying, “If your whole candidacy is about words, then they should be your own words.”

Well, of course it WAS plagerism. Turn in a term paper that someone else had previously presented, which interacts with other writers to make a particular point with a particular refrain, and see what they think about it.

But let’s get beyond whose words it was. It was a great speech. That “Just words” part just rocked.

So it seems only fitting to use that refrain again with some more recent words surrounding the Obama campaign, words that are far more relevant to Barack Obama than the many noble phrases he quoted from great men of earlier times.

Let me play the “just words” game for a little bit.

When Barack Obama’s pastor for some 23 years said:

“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere … That’s the world! On which hope sits.”

Just words.

When Jeremiah Wright said:

“The government gives them [African Americans] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”

Just words.

When Wright said of the United States:

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

Just words.

“We’ve got more black men in prison than there are in college,” he said. “Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body.”

Just words.

When the Rev. Wright said:

“America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. … We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers. … We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi. … We put (Nelson) Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.”

Yep. Just words.

When Wright shouted out to his cheering congregation:

“We started the AIDS virus. … We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty.”

“The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Just words.

And, of course, when Wright said:

“We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic. … We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means. …”

Those were just words.

This past weekend, when Father Michael Pfleger – a longtime friend and spiritual mentor of Barack Obama, said from the pulpit of Obama’s church:

When Hillary was crying, and people said that was put on, I really don’t believe it was put on. I really believe that she just always thought, ‘this is mine. I’m Bill’s wife. I’m white, and this is mine. I just gotta get up and step into the plate.’

Then out of nowhere, ‘I’m Barack Obama!’

Imitating Hillary’s response, screaming at the top of his lungs again, he continues, ‘Ah, damn! Where did you come from? I’m white! I’m entitled! There’s a black man stealing my show!’

(mocks crying)

She wasn’t the only one crying, there was a whole lot of white people crying!

Just words.

When Father Pfleger said:

“Honestly now, to address the one who says, ‘Don’t hold me responsible for what my ancestors did.’ But you have enjoyed the benefits of what your ancestors did … and unless you are ready to give up the benefits, throw away your 401 fund, throw away your trust fund, throw away all the monies you put away into the company you walked into because your daddy and grand daddy. …”

Shouting, Pfleger continued, “Unless you are willing to give up the benefits then you must be responsible for what was done in your generation, because you are the beneficiaries of this insurance policy.”

Just words (well, unless you mind having everything you own taken away from you and given to someone else to make up for “historic injustices”).

And when Obama’s good friend Father Pfleger said:

“Racism is still America’s greatest addiction. I also believe that America is also the greatest sin against God.”

Just words.

Now, when Barack Obama opined to a wine-sipping, cheese nibbling crowd in San Franscisco:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Just words.

When Obama said:

“I can no more disown [Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother, a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

And when he said:

“The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity — she doesn’t,” he said. “But she is a typical white person who, you know, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there is a reaction. That has been bred into our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way.”

Just words.

When Obama told the story:

I had an uncle who was one of the — who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps. And the story in our family was that when he came home, he just went up into the attic and he didn’t leave the house for six months.

Just words. Especially when considering that Barack Obama didn’t actually have any uncles, or that Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army. What’s are the discrepancies of a bogus family connection, a horrible confusion of history, 500 miles of geography, and the difference of about a million murdered Jews among friends?

And when Obama recently said:

“It is wonderful to be back in Oregon,” Obama said. “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it.”

Just words, of course. Everyone knows that it’s only John McCain’s gaffes that should count.

So there you have it. Words are powerful, transformational things, or else they are completely trivial and irrelevant. It all depends on how Barack Obama feels about them.

Well, Barack Obama has left Trinity United Church. He has demonstrated that he is morally qualified to be president.

Oops. It’s 2008, and NOT 1985, when the move would have demonstrated that he actually had a functioning moral compass.

Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago was no more toxic last Sunday than it was over twenty-three years ago when a young Barack Obama first arrived. In his 1993 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Barack Obama recalled a vivid description recalling his first meeting with Wright back in 1985. The Rev. Wright warned Barack Obama that getting involved with Trinity might turn off other black clergy because of the church’s radical reputation. It’s not that Obama didn’t know about the radicalism at Trinity. It’s that he didn’t care.

Obama has said that Jeremiah Wright was instrumental in attracting him to the church he joined and has acknowledged he titled his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” after one of Wright’s sermons. One of Wright’s sermons, “The Audacity to Hope,” was so inspiring to Obama that he titled his book “The Audacity of Hope” after it. That message, by the way, contained the phrase, “white greed drives a world in need.”

So you can only imagine how Jeremiah Wright must have felt when Barack Obama threw him under the bus and denounced his views when they were the exact same views he had been preaching the day Obama came to the church 23 years before. Obama was fine with them before they became national public knowledge, and disapproving of them after. But Wright had been preaching the same message when he married Barack and Michelle Obama; he’d been preaching the same message when he baptized their daughters; he’d been preaching the same message when Barack Obama asked him to serve on his campaign’s spiritual leadership council. And in point of fact, he had been preaching the same message the day Barack Obama dis-invited him to speak at the event announcing his candidacy for president.

Of Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama, one of these men has been consistent his entire career; and that man has been Jeremiah Wright, not Barack Obama. Jeremiah Wright didn’t just begin saying this stuff at age 72; he’s been preaching the same message to the same choir for well over thirty years. Does anyone actually believe that Jeremiah Wright just discovered his message?

Which is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that would make a posturing political demagogue angry.

With this prelude, let me interact with Barack Obama’s press conference announcing his withdrawal of membership from Trinity. But let me begin by asking the questions that pointedly WEREN’T asked at the press conference:

* How on earth can you possibly justify having remained in that church environment for 23 years?

* Are you suggesting that Jeremiah Wright just recently discovered these views, and in no way harbored them all along?

* How can you have endorsed Jeremiah Wright, calling him your spiritual adviser, your uncle, your mentor, your moral compass, and then disavow this man who has been preaching the same message all along? How are you not responsible for his teachings and views when you so completely endorsed the man for so many years? What about other friends and spiritual advisors you have similarly endorsed over a period of years, such as Rev. Michael Pfleger? What about Rev. Otis Moss, who you again endorsed this very day? He embraced Pfleger as a friend of Trinity, and then specifically thanked God for Pfleger’s hateful remarks immediately after he made them! How on earth can you claim not to in any way be responsible for these peoples’ views when you have endorsed the people who have been saying these things for years?

* Do you endorse Malcom X and Louis Farrakhan as your church has officially done? Why on earth would you remain in a church that would endorse such figures of hate and divisiveness?

* As an ostensible intellectual, are you completely ignorant of the teachings of the black liberation theology embraced by Trinity? Are you ignorant of where it derived from or what it represents? How do you – as a self-acknowledged intelligent man – justify sitting under the teaching of what is clearly a blatantly racist and anti-American theology?

Now let us look at Obama’s version of reality in his leaving Trinity Church as given in his prepared remarks:

We have many friends among the 8,000 congregants who attend there. We are proud of the extraordinary works that the church continues to perform throughout the community, to help the hungry, and the homeless and people in need of medical care.

I have tremendous regard for the great young pastor who has taken over – Rev. Moss – and continue to admire the work that Rev. Wright did in building up the church. But it’s clear that now that I’m a candidate for president, every time something is said in the church by anyone associated with Trinity – including guest pastors – the remarks will be imputed to me even if they totally conflict with my long held views, statements, and principles.

We obviously saw an example of that in the recent statements by Father Pfleger, who is someone I have known, who I consider a friend, who has done tremendous work in Chicago, but made offensive statements that had no place in our politics and in the pulpit; that unfairly mocked and characterized Senator Clinton in ways that I think are unacceptable.

It’s also clear that Rev. Moss and the Church had been suffering from all the tension my campaign has visited on them. We’ve had news organizations harassing members at their homes and their work places. We had reporters grabbing church bulletins and calling up the sick and the shut-in in an attempt to get news about the church. We’ve had news organizations scrutinizing Rev. Moss’s sermons and attempting to make political hay out of even the most innocuous or innocent remarks by him. That’s just not how people should have to operate in their church. It’s not fair to the other members of the church who seek to worship in peace.

Barack Obama speaks of the politicization and news coverage of his church as though both he and the church are somehow victims. It is true that no president in recent memory has ever had his church become such an issue. But, in the words of Rolling Stone Magazine (which is liberal to its core):

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama’s life, or his politics. The senator “affirmed” his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a “sounding board” to “make sure I’m not losing myself in the hype and hoopla.” Both the title of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright’s sermons. “If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from,” says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, “just look at Jeremiah Wright.”

The thing that makes Trinity United Church so incredibly relevant politically is because it is 1) such an intensely radical church environment, and 2) because Barack Obama is so intimately connected with a pastor who has been demonstrated to be a purveyor of anti-Americansism and racial hatred. You’re just not going to find anything like that in an examination of the church affiliations of John McCain, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and on and on. None of our presidents who have come before would ever have dreamed of joining such a radical church, or so deeply embracing such divisive pastors.

When Jeremiah Wright talked about “white greed” in his now-famous “Audacity of Hope” message, he was perfectly expounding on black liberation thought. When he claimed that white America deliberately created the AIDS virus as a genocide against blacks, he was accurately exegeting black liberation ideology of class based warfare against the oppressed black class. Or, expressed negatively, when he said that anti-crack cocaine penalties were instituted by racist legislators for the purpose of incarcerating as many blacks as possible, how was that in any way contrary to his central theological beliefs? When Wright denounced Israel as a Zionist state that imposed “injustice and … racism” on Palestinians, how was this not in perfect accord with his theology? When Wright railed against “AmeriKKKa” in his sermons, just how was that contrary to black liberation thought? And when Wright lectured American society that it deserved 9/11, was this in any way out of bounds with either the teachings of black liberation theologians or the Marxism from which they derived their message?

As for his “many friends among the 8,000 congregants who attend” at Trinity, is Barack Obama referring to those thousands of cheering congregants who gave the hate of Michael Pfleger a standing ovation, and who similarly rose to cheer the rants of Jeremiah Wright? Michael Pfleger, by the way, is not merely a “guest speaker,” but a regular speaker at Trinity. Was he referring to the Rev. Otis Moss, who called Pfleger a “brother beloved, he is a preacher par-excellence, he is a prophetic powerful pulpiteer” before his message and said “We thank God for the message, and we thank God for the messenger. We thank God for Father Michael Pfleger. We thank God for Father Mike” after the message? How on earth could Barack Obama continue to call Otis Moss a wonderful young pastor and speak of his tremendous regard for this man who so embraced and applauded anti-American hate and anti-white racism?

And I cannot help but watch and read Barack Obama’s statements – as well as the Democrat’s embrace of this man – with stunned amazement. He is not outraged by the statements themselves as much as he is offended that they have been broadcast and covered in a way harmful to his candidacy. There is simply an appalling lack of outrage over appallingly outrageous statements that we now know so thoroughly characterize the life and soul of his church.

Obama said, “I am not denouncing the church. I am not interested in people who want me to denounce the church because it’s not a church worthy of denouncing. And so if they’ve seen caricatures of the church and accept those caricatures despite my insistence that’s not what the church is about, then there’s not much I can do about it.”

Obama’s description of “caricatures” hearkens to his previous statements that his pastors’ views had been taken out of context in endless loops. But we now know that the views we have heard are neither caricatures or statements out of context: rather, Wright defended them one by one, and they accurately represent the pastor’s position. Furthermore, the church congregation that embraced these radical preachers wildly cheered and applauded all these terrible remarks – including the very worst ones. How one earth does one NOT find all the church worthy of denunciation?

And Obama said, “I have to say this was one I didn’t see coming. We knew there were going to be some things we didn’t see coming. This was one. I didn’t anticipate my fairly conventional Christian faith being subject to such challenge and such scrutiny,” said Obama. He said it has been months since he has been at the church, on Chicago’s South Side. “I did not anticipate my fairly conventional Christian faith being subjected to such…scrutiny.”

I ask, how can a candidate for the highest office in the world be so uncomprehending? How can he show such idiotic personal judgment? How can he even condemn these remarks when he sees them as “conventional”? There is no question that he is taking a whining tone here; it’s not that outright offensive vile hate was coming out of the church; it’s that he didn’t anticipate his “fairly” conventional Christian faith being subjective to scrutiny. He still doesn’t get it. He has said he disapproves of or disagrees with the remarks that now number in the dozens; but there is simply no demonstration even yet that he was genuinely offended by anything other than the attention these many statements of hate received.

Obama’s defenders have analogized the toxic environment of Trinity with the revelations of the sex abuse of priests in the Catholic Church. But there is no similarity, unless the priests in mass after mass shouted out that they were abusing young teenage boys as the crowds screamed and applauded their approval. The abuses occurred in secret, and their revelation brought outrage; the sermons of Jeremiah Wright (and now Michael Pfleger) occurred at the pulpit in the midst of a cheering congregation.

Similarly, Obama’s defenders have attempted to create a moral equivelence between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger and John McCain and John Hagee and Rod Parsely. Again, come on! McCain barely knew these men. They weren’t his friends. They weren’t his “spiritual advisors.” They didn’t marry him or baptize his daughters. McCain didn’t write books named after their sermons. And McCain didn’t endorse them – as Barack Obama has specifically endorsed his growing list of radical reverends – they endorsed him. Only fools would accept such a ridiculous comparison.

And Obama’s defenders have said that a candidate for president ought to be able to hear divergent and even divisive views without having those views ascribed to that candidate. Obama himself said, “I do think that there is certainly a tradition in the African American church, but I think there’s a tradition in a lot of churches, to speak out about injustice, to speak out against issues like racism or sexism or economic inequality. And, you know, my hope would be that pastors who — well, let me put it this way. My hope would be that any presidential candidate can go to a church and hear a sermon and even hear some controversial statements without those views being imputed to them and being subject to the same exacting political tests that a presidential candidate or that presidential candidate’s statements would be.”

But then let all the people who hold this view go to a white supremacist church and listen to their views for 23 years. Let them bring their families into this environment, and let them say of the white supremacist church pastors what Obama has said of the radical pastors of his own church. You know that they would never do this, because they could not stomach the message. The point is that Obama – and these knee-jerk liberals who are defending him – do and have affirmed the radical, racist, anti-American message of Trinity United Church. Obama’s membership is no big deal to such people simply because don’t have a problem with the church’s teachings.

This is a church and a pastoral leadership affirmed by the church that has embraced the person and teachings of Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam. It is a church whose poison has repeatedly been demonstrated for everyone to see. And anyone who would tolerate such an environment for any length of time has no business of ever being a president of the United States.

Father Michael Pfleger, an invited speaker at Trinity United Church in Chicago, was introduced by the Rev. Otis Moss – who has received Barack Obama’s full endorsement – as a “brother beloved, he is a preacher par-excellence, he is a prophetic powerful pulpiteer.”

This is because Pfleger is a black liberation theology advocate just like Jeremiah Wright. It’s because he has been lauded by Trinity’s Trumpet Magazine as “afro-centric to the core.”

[garbled] expose white entitlement. And supremacy, wherever it raises its head. I said before, I really don’t want ot make this political, because you know I’m really very unpolitical.

When Hillary was crying, and people said that was put on, I really don’t believe it was put on. I really believe that she just always thought, ‘this is mine. I’m Bill’s wife. I’m white, and this is mine. I just gotta get up and step into the plate.’

Then out of nowhere, ‘I’m Barack Obama!’

Imitating Hillary’s response, screaming at the top of his lungs again, he continues, ‘Ah, damn! Where did you come from? I’m white! I’m entitled! There’s a black man stealing my show!’

(mocks crying)

She wasn’t the only one crying, there was a whole lot of white people crying!

After concluding, Otis Moss – Barack Obama’s “wonderful young pastor” – said, “We thank God for the message, and we thank God for the messenger. We thank God for Father Michael Pfleger. We thank God for Father Mike.”

The verbal picture is of a racist Hillary Clinton demanding her God-given entitlement as a white person, and a sea of white people – racists all – crying along with her.

And to complete this picture, you should know that earlier in that same message, Father Pfleger had said:

“Honestly now, to address the one who says, ‘Don’t hold me responsible for what my ancestors did.’ But you have enjoyed the benefits of what your ancestors did … and unless you are ready to give up the benefits, throw away your 401 fund, throw away your trust fund, throw away all the monies you put away into the company you walked into because your daddy and grand daddy. …”

Shouting, Pfleger continued, “Unless you are willing to give up the benefits then you must be responsible for what was done in your generation, because you are the beneficiaries of this insurance policy.”

So, if you are white and you are considering ever retiring, you pretty much meet Pfleger’s definition – and by logical extension the Trinity United Church that cheered his views – of being “racist.” I hope you’re not one of “those people.” I mean, if you haven’t already sold everything you own and given it to your closest African-American neighbor, you know what to call yourself, right?

Now, of course, we are once again going to hear about the fact that “you can’t make Barack Obama guilty by association,” blah blah blah.

And don’t you dare condemn the church. Or the congregation. Don’t you dare condemn the thousands of people loudly cheering hateful message after hateful message.

It’s just funny to me how these longtime acquaintances of Barack Obama’s little circle of hate keep “surprising” him with incendiary racial rhetoric.

It’s just funny to me that a politician who claims to represent “hope” and “change” can spend some 23 years sitting in a toxic environment, and somehow never be offended enough to leave.

You see, I come from a tradition that I guess must be courageous beyond imagining in the postmodern world: I come from a tradition where you don’t associate yourself with despicable views. If you go to a church that broadcasts this kind of vile nonsense, you leave that church. You don’t stay there for 20-plus years, and then “disassociate” yourself from the message.

So Barack Obama says “As I have traveled this country, I’ve been impressed not by what divides us, but by all that that unites us. That is why I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger’s divisive, backward-looking rhetoric, which doesn’t reflect the country I see or the desire of people across America to come together in common cause.” Like he’s some lawyer parsing some legal technicality rather than a man appalled at blatant racism and hard-core Marxist apologetics.

Pardon me for viewing that as a cynical, cowardly detachment from shocking and horrifying views.

Forget world leaders, totalitarian regimes, and sponsors of global terror. This politician can’t even figure out how to deal with the lunatic views of his own church.

Barack Obama is in a real political bind now: if he leaves Trinity United tomorrow, he implicitly acknowledges that he never should have been there in the first place, because nothing new is going on there that hasn’t been going on for years and years. And if he doesn’t leave, he continues to implicitly affirm that there isn’t really anything so bad about the views that the church continually expresses.